Black Box Phenomena
by Rokhal
Summary: Season 7. Sam is very, very good at hiding his hallucinations.


Setting: First half of Season 7.  
Warnings: Gore

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Marissa Holter lived alone in a peeling Victorian tract home that smelled of mice and cinnamon potpourri, and now of drugstore aftershave and the brand of bourbon that came in plastic jugs. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, pulling it away black, and twisted her fingers in the hem of her skirt.

Sam faced her across an oak coffee table, on a faded red couch, resting his elbows on his knees. His jacket tugged under his shoulders. He hunched down anyway so he could look up at her, eyes widened, notebook dangling in slack fingers as though forgotten. "The music box," he suggested. "Did your mother say where she bought it?"

Marissa looked up from her lap, an instinctive, childlike horror shivering her jaw. Sam kept his expression open, brows a touch high, shoulders loose and rounded, mouth solemn but not grave. "We were on Mackinac Island," she recalled, hesitant. Her voice echoed oddly. Sam felt a firm touch at his back, and between one tick of the clock and the next, the left side of his face was gone. Knife-wings.

He took a slow deliberate breath, relaxing against a whole-body flinch and feeling the air bubble through his bleeding sinus. The shattered roots of his molars thrummed, and a hot wash of blood rolled down the side of his throat and dripped from his chin.

Beside him, Dean hadn't twitched. "There was an estate sale," Marissa murmured, sniffing. "Johnson House, Johnston House, something with a J. Some historic building."

Sam scissored his notebook between his fingers as small wet hands rose from the mauve brocade of the late Mrs. Holter's couch to knead and hook into his bare skin. His lower left eyelid was gone, and his vision was starting to blur. The hum and fire of his face and teeth was making it hard to concentrate. Marissa's hair rose up and whirled around her head, longer than he remembered, feet long, black and glittering like volcanic glass. A stray lock slit his good eye. Sam blinked reflexively and felt his upper lid drop into the cut as the globe collapsed, eyewater clumping in his lashes and spilling down his cheek. Fractals and fireworks swarmed his vision, and the phantom pain bloomed dangerously close to his threshold. Another minute and he'd be bawling on the floor in the middle of the interview.

He reached for his sore palm with his pen. More wet hands extruded from the couch to stop him, frightfully strong and tightening steadily steadily around his wrists. Two were working long gray claws between the bones of his forearm. His pen hand went pins-and-needles—a nerve was gone, and without breaking his blinded eyes' contact with Marissa, he couldn't check that the pen was still there. There were so many hands now that they enveloped him, wrapping and clinging to him with slick cold fingers as they drew him backward into the black maw he sat against; he felt the room tilt, and forced himself to ignore the vertigo, to hold still and let them roll him. The hands were drawing his arms apart, spread-eagle, stretching the bands of his shoulders. He resisted carefully. If his arms were still where he left them in the real world, his hands would come slowly and casually together, even if he couldn't feel them moving. He just had to not panic.

A ray of true pain struck through, a thin dissonance that scattered the old game into wisp and memory. Sam was still perched at the edge of the couch. His eyes had drifted a bit from Marissa's, but his listening face was more or less intact. He scratched the scar on his palm with the pen and checked on Dean in the corner of his eye—no change, still watching their witness with a weary smirk, like a shark breathing.

"—but in the end, they let her take it on the plane," Marissa finished, her voice still hoarse from recent tears.

Sam flipped his notebook back open and readied his pen, smiling apologetically. "I'm sorry, could you go over that again?"

She dabbed her eyes again and nodded. Sam got the cross-streets for the estate sale. When his notes were as complete as he could get them, he met Dean's eyes, Dean shrugged, and the interview was done.

* * *

**Note:** Disclaimer, blah, blah, blah. I like the idea that the reason we rarely saw any indication that Sam was having Hellucinations during season 7 was because Sam was such a badass about hiding the signs, not because the writers and directors forgot about it for most of the episodes.


End file.
